How to Calculate the Amount of Pages You Should Print for Your Booklet

How to Calculate the Amount of Pages You Should Print for Your Booklet

Designing without calculating the number of pages you need for your booklet is a recipe for a design disaster. Knowing the number of pages and creating a proper layout makes sure your booklet printing will run smoothly and that your company saves time, money, effort, and other resources. So, how many pages should a booklet be? 

Truthfully, there are very few rules to how many pages does a booklet have to contain. The pages can be as few as 8 or as many as 200. However, there are things you need to remember when calculating the number of pages for your booklet design.

The Minimum

Booklets have a minimum number of pages to be considered as booklets. They need at least 8 pages. Otherwise, the print product can be considered a folded leaflet.

Remember: The minimum amount of pages differs, depending on the booklet binding method: 

  • stapled – minimum of 8 pages
  • perfect bound – minimum of 52 pages
  • loop stitched – minimum of 8 pages
  • wire-o binding – minimum of 10 pages

The Booklet Binding Method

Standard booklets, such as stapled booklets, loop-stitched booklets, and hardcover booklets, are created by binding folded sheets of paper at the spine. Due to this particular booklet binding method, booklet pages must always come in multiples of 4. Each folded sheet of paper fastened adds 4 pages to the booklet. This results in booklet pages amounting to even numbers only.

While it is possible to create a booklet design file with pages not divisible by 4, it will result in your printed booklet having white blank pages at the end.

There is an exception to the rule: Wire-O booklets. These booklets are created by binding individual printed pages with an aluminium silver wire. Booklet pages only need to come in multiples of 2. For every sheet fastened, only 2 pages are added.

The Limit

Consider the maximum number of pages each booklet binding method can hold. Each method has a limit to how many pages it can bind. Here’s a quick run-through: 

  • stapled – up to 64 pages
  • perfect bound – up to 200 pages
  • loop stitched – up to 64 pages
  • wire-o binding – up to 64 pages

The purpose

Think about what you want to achieve with your booklets. What is the goal of your marketing campaign or why do you need booklets?

Direct mailing

For instance, if you are looking to send out booklets to your customers to tell them about your new products, you might not need a lot of pages. You can use a booklet of 8-16 pages so that you can easily send it in a direct mailing to your clients.

Brand book

If you are in need of a brand book, maybe you should consider the size of your company and your operations. Say you are a huge corporation, which operates in the field of design, you might need a lot of space to explain every detail of your branding, a 52-64 page booklet would do. On the flip side, if you are a smaller company, just getting started into building a brand, you might need less space and a booklet of 20-32 pages would suffice. 

Trade show  

Have you decided to include a booklet in your goodie bag at your next exhibition? If you plan to give an overview of your business, maybe a bigger booklet of 12-24 pages is perfect or you thought it’s best to just do a promotion on a couple of products, then, 8 pages are enough. 

Training manual

If you thought of the clever idea to use a booklet as a training manual for your employees, you might need a lot more space to explain all the peculiarities of a job, so consider the 100-150 page booklets.

When you calculate the number of pages you’ll need, before you start designing, you can ensure that you’ll have the right template depending on the binding type that suits your page quantity best!